A couple weeks ago I heard about this app called Sleep Cycle. Sleep Cycle is a bio-alarm clock that analyzes your sleep patterns and tries to wake you when you are in the lightest point in your sleep cycle. The app only costs .99$. It was actually the first app I have ever purchased. I purchased Sleep Cycle for two reasons. First, I definitely believe in the power of waking up at the right time. Two, I thought this was a pretty innovative app and was worth a try for a buck.

If you know anything about sleep, than you know we sleep in cycles. We move in and out of a dream states and a deep sleeps. An average cycles is about 90 minutes long. The theory goes that if you wake up during your deep sleep, you do not feel as rested. If you wake up when you are in the lightest point of your sleep cycle, you will be able to wake up and get out of bed much easier. I find this to be somewhat true, depending on how much sleep I actually get. Usually I sleep about 6-7 hours each night… I usually go to bed late and get up early.

One thing that I really like about this app is that it keeps a historical record of your sleep cycles for each night. The first thing I do in the morning is look at my previous night’s sleep. Check out my graphs for this past work week:

If you look at Thursday, you will see some weird spikes around 2:30AM and 5:00AM. Those were when Gus woke me up to drink some water and then woke me up to go outside (because he drank too much water, I assume).

As much as I love this app, I think there are two major flaws.

1. The app is a basic alarm clock, which is great. The way it works is, if you need to be up by 6:30, then you set the Sleep Cycle alarm to wake you up by 6:30. It monitors your sleep cycle and when it feels you are at the most “awake” point in your cycle, it will wake you up. However, if you are in a deep sleep it will wait until 6:30 to wake you up. This is fine, the problem is that you only have a 30 minute window. So it will wake you up anywhere between 6:00 and 6:30. The problem is that the average sleep cycle is 90 minutes. There have been times when my cycle dropped to deep sleep right before the 6:00 mark and it woke me up at 6:30 while I was still deep asleep.I think it would make more sense to make the “alarm” window 45 minutes or 90 minutes… or customizable.

2. I only use this app Monday through Friday because I generally do not need to be up at a certain time on the weekends. However, I would still really like to know what my sleep cycle was like on the weekends. It would be great if I could just set it to track my sleep, then whenever I woke up and I could see what happened through the night. Currently the only way to accomplish this is to set an alarm for later than you would normally wake up. Here is an example of what the graph looks like when I woke up on my own:

I guess those two are not really major flaws… they are more like, major feature requests. Some other feature ideas would be:

• Ability to customize the alarm sound from the iPhone’s music collection.
• Enable the recording device to record whenever it detected noise. So when I am in my dream sleep, I can click to see what I may have said through the night.
• It currently allows you to share your stats by email and Facebook, should add an option for Twitter.

Well, that is about it, overall I really like this app and have already incorporated it into my daily routine. I do not think it will help me get more sleep, but hopefully it will continue to help me wake up easier.

A couple months ago I received a copy of Mega Belt by Nick May to review for Energion Publications. May’s goal in this writing is to write a believable fictional account of a young man named Gil. Gil’s life reflects the experiences Mays’ has had in the Bible Belt and with Mega Churches. May uses irony and satire to engage his reader throughout his recounting of Gil’s memories.

Each chapter in Mega Belt covers various life experiences an average churcher1 would have in the Bible Belt. The chapters cover things like our Easter Sunday traditions, Ice Cream socials, Youth Group, Mega Churches, hitting Rock Bottom, and more. If you are from the North (as I am) you may find it difficult to relate to many of Gil’s experiences. However, there are times when a lot of these traditions and questions posed by Gil will reflect some of your own experiences, regardless of where you call home.

For me the first few chapters of this book were slow and fairly dry. It started to get more interesting around halfway through the book. I really felt like the last two chapters were the best chapters. May admits in his foreword that most of his readers will “hate how it ends.” [XI] Frankly, I thought the end was fine. I didn’t expect a huge conclusion to Gil’s thoughts, I felt like this book represented the beginning for Gil. I think most people on a journey with Jesus will share some of Gil’s frustrations and are probably around the same place spiritually that May left us with him.

I give this book 3 out of 5 Circus Peanuts. It is a fairly short and easy read. I did not think there was much insight was given, but May was just trying to tell a story, so you shouldn’t expect much insight.

The Plot

Avatar takes place on the planet Pandora. Pandora is inhabited by the Na’vi, a blue humanoid species, with feline characteristics. The Na’vi are also much taller and stronger than humans. Pandora is filled with wondrous flora and fauna, unlike anything seen on Earth. It also has large deposits of a rare mineral called Unobtainium.

The RDA corporation, run by humans, has landed on Pandora and is trying to harvest this rare and expensive mineral for profit. One of the largest deposits of Unobtainium is right beneath a large Na’vi tribe. The only option for RDA is to move the Na’vi to a different location, any way they can.

A scientist, Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) developed a way to combine Human DNA with Na’vi DNA. These Na’vi are called Avatars. Each Avatar has a single “host” who controls it — basically whoever’s DNA they used to create it. The humans mind is then connected to the Avatar’s mind which allows the human to go out in Pandora to interact with it’s surroundings as a Na’vi might.

The main character, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), is put into the Avatar program by happenstance. He is an ex-Marine, paraplegic and is used by RDA Corporation to negotiate the Na’vi’s eviction. With the promise of getting his “legs back” he becomes torn between his growing love for the Avatars and his orders.

The 3D

I really thought the 3D added to this movie, the planet Pandora was remarkably beautiful and the 3D added to its believability. James Cameron (the creator of Avatar) worked long and hard to create what he created and succeed greatly in imagining this beautiful world. This was my first 3D movie, in a long time. The last one I remember was an IMAX movie at the Bostom Museum of Science with Red and Blue glasses. Cameron actually had a special camera developed to create a new “3D” for this movie. I still felt like this 3D gave me a bit of a headache. In my opinion, the problem with fake 3D is that your brain feels like it should be able to focus on certain objects, but the director wants you to focus on different objects. In real life, if a sword point is right in your face, you can focus on the tip of the sword or the person holding it. In a 3D movie, if you try to focus on the tip of the sword, but the camera man is only focused on the person holding it, your brain freaks out and gives you headache. At least, that’s how I think it works :).

So, yes, I did leave Avatar with a slight headache, but it was worth it just to see the 3D version of this movie.

The Movie

In order to truly critique Avatar you have to compare it to Star Wars. Why? Because James Cameron’s goal with Avatar was to beat the socks off of George Lucas [1]. Cameron has actually been working on Avatar since 1995… probably before that in his mind, since he was inspired to become a director after watching Star Wars. However, the technology was not where it needed to be in 1995, so he had to sit on it… and he sat on it for a long time. But he wasn’t just sitting, he was working on helping improve 3D by convincing Sony to develop a special 3D camera. Then he had to work on getting buy-in for 3D projects from movie theatres, which required him to support other movies going 3D before he could do Avatar. He worked with a linguist to create the a language for the Na’vi to speak, they named all the flora and fauna on Pandora, with Na’vi words, English words, and Latin words. I really get the impression he has spent his whole career on trying to beat Lucas – even if it was only the past 15 years.

So, what did I think of the movie? Well, Cameron succeed in making a much better version of The FernGully. The plots between Avatar and FernGully are almost identical.If you do not remember the movie, it was animated, and put out by FOX back in 1992. I actually remember it fondly and thought it was a good movie when I was 12.

The differences between The FernGully and Avatar are:

1. The protagonists in FernGully were harvesting trees from the rain forest, not Unobtainium from Pandora.
2. The victims were magical fairies, not the Na’vi.
3. The “hero” was a logger who was accidentally “shrank” to fairy size by one of the fairies to save him from being crushed by a falling tree, not an ex-marine turned into an Avatar.

Other than that, the plots are very similar. Of course The FernGully was a lot more silly because it was a childrens movie and Avatar is much more mature. I do find the similarities/differences to be quite humorous though.

Do I think that Avatar is going to be the next Star Wars? Well, it’s hard to say. Star Wars was a like nothing ever seen before in the theatres. It was also big enough to have a franchise created from it. Avatar is like nothing ever seen before in theatres, but I’m not sure its big enough to have a franchise created from it. Star Wars took place in the Universe, not just a single planet with a single victim. In Star Wars thousands of components and characters worked together and against each other. In Avatar, it was just one group of victims, one group of protagonists, and one group of heroes. All of the success Star Wars had, plus a driving vision from George Lucas allowed Star Wars to become a huge franchise. I have no idea what Cameron’s vision is for the next “Avatar” (if there will be one)… but if he wants to beat Lucas, he needs to have one. Right now, all Avatar has is beautiful CG and a borrowed plot.

That’s not to say that Avatar was bad, it was good, it was really good. I felt very connected with the characters, the movie made me wish I was on Pandora and that I had the ability to be an Avatar, to experience what Jack Sully was experiencing. I would recommend seeing this movie, especially in 3D.

I have to give this movie 4.5 Circus Peanuts. Cameron succeeded in pouring his life work into this movie and coming out with something great… I hope he can continue the franchise like Star Wars, but I doubt it will happen. But they did make a sequel to FernGully, so I could be wrong.

Check out Speck’s website for more information about their cases and other products.

I purchased mine from TechNGnet at Amazon.

Challies concludes his review by warning his readers, “That The Shack is a dangerous book should be obvious from this review. . . . I urge you, the reader, to exercise care in reading and distributing this book. . . . Read it only with the utmost care and concern, critically evaluating the book against the unchanging standard of Scripture.”

Although I do disagree that The Shack is a dangerous book to read, I agree that we should all read it with care and concern, prayerfully and critically evaluating the book against Scripture. What concerns me most about The Shack is not the book itself, but the negative reviews I have read about the book. Most of these reviewers are very influential among their respective church cultures. They have turned a whole society of Christians against Young without ever laying an eye on The Shack. Claiming that Young is promoting Goddess worship, universalism, inclusivism, modalism, and more is just inaccurate. When I read these reviews I always wonder if the reader had actually read The Shack or if they skimmed through it looking for what could be wrong with it.

In the introduction of this series, I mentioned that a recent Facebook conversation resparked my desire to write this review. During that conversation I said, “I would be interested in finding out how many people commenting on this thread have actually read the book.” I find it interesting that none of the people giving The Shack a negative review said whether or not they had read the book. The only people who actually read The Shack were the people giving it positive reviews.

What I found most scary was when someone told me that I was being unreasonable to expect reviewers of The Shack to actually read the book. This mindset seems prevalent among some Christian leaders. The justification is “when a member of my church explains the nature of God in an entirely erroneous fashion and then proceeds to tell me that the book The Shack was instrumental in formulating her ideas, I have every reason to be concerned about what she has read, regardless of whether or not I have personally read it.” To which I must respond it is very irresponsible to pass judgment and elude to discernment about something we have never experienced/read. Just because someone comes away from a book with some “off-the-wall” ideas does not mean that the book teaches those ideas. Some prominent examples would be, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentacostals, Baptists, Catholics, etc. and that is after reading/studying the Bible! Not a fictional book written by an author who admits it is purely a metaphor.

To conclude, The Shack, is definitely a controversial book. Before you pass judgment on it, please take the time to read it yourself. Read it prayerfully, discerningly, and compare it to what is revealed to us in Scripture. You may find that the negative reviews written about it are mostly out of context.

Is Young 100% correct in his theology? Probably not, but I do not expect any of us are. Young is talking about the journey we are all on towards Jesus, I do not suppose we will be perfect in our theology until Jesus comes back.

Related: Check out this interview of William P. Young from CBN.